I don't like the kind of posts that simply talk about the things I did today - my writing needs to have some kind of theme to pull it altogether. But today's been the kind of day that seems a thing all of itself - long, beautiful, and lovely, with dashings of sweetness and lashings of loveliness. As I drove back from the shops with a bottle of red wine, it felt like enough of a day to write about it.

Last night the southern lights, Aurora Australis, was brighter in the south than it had been in thirty years by my reckoning. The internet seems full of photos from the Dandenongs to the Great Ocean Road. People were seeing it from their back yards. We didn't, because I had gone to bed early, but still, the morning had a vibe to it anyway. I was up pre dawn, driving down to the coast.

It's ANZAC day here in Australia and a public holiday, so I expected it to be busy. Still, this break is usually just locals early, and the ocean swim club that were popping champage at 6.45, perhaps in celebration of the so-called lucky country. I remember them, I do. I think of the men who have had to fight a war that was never theirs, the narrative of sacrifice for one's country, the brutality, the amount of taxes that gets invested in the military whilst people live without a roof out over their head or proper health care, the fact that the Gallipoli landing in the first world war was a right royal cock up and we commemerorate it to buggery, as if we won it, and the fact that ANZAC day becomes a fucking commodity like everything else. I like to see the dawn in and remember the men whose lives have been brutally cut short by war, and those who are left with PTSD and little support.

I'm including three 'war' reggae songs in this as I'm listening to them as I'm writing this post. Thus this post finds a place in #threetunetuesday by @ablaze, a loose connection - but you seriously can't beat some reggae in Autumnal sunshine. If you choose one song to listen to from this post, listen to the last one - it goes for seven minutes, but it's bloody lovely, so listen to it whilst you do some HIVE engaging or something. Its not so much about war in a military sense but 'throwing down your arms' as an alternative to violence.

Two of us have a little fuss
Ev'rything you draw, you're last
Ev'rything you run for your gun
Ev'rything you fling rock stone, hear this
Throw down your arms and come
Throw down your arms and come
Throw down your arms and come
Drop them

But the morning wasn't a somber one - it was full of happiness as people had a day off, the air was warm, and the sun rise was absolutely blood magnificent. For an hour it was just six of us, and for a long while, me and some girls chatted about all kinds of things. We were talking about whether we care or not what people think of what we look like and I said that I didn't anymore, but it's only taken me fifty years to get here, and now that I'm invisible it doesn't matter. That was met with a chorus of 'WE SEE YOU!!!!!!!!' which made me fairly cry, which you couldn't tell, on account of the salt water. The waves were tiny and I only got two but it didn't matter so much.

At home my husband was still in bed so I forced him out onto the front deck in the sunshine and we drank a cuppa and ate the healthy nut and seed loaf for brekky I'd made the day before. We then went and stole a trailer load of eucalyptus mulch. When I say steal, sometimes the council dumps it on council land and it just stays there for months, and no one misses a trailer load or two should someone like us come collecting. I am frantic to patch up the areas of mulch before we go away next year and it's a huge job. I've been hassling Jamie to do it for ages and I was so happy he did, because it looks gorgeous.

I also enlisted him to help me with some more trellising to stop the chickens jumping out - I figured out where they were doing it so I hope I've solved that problem.

We made veggie burgers for lunch - vegetarian patties with beetroot, fried onion, coleslaw, pickles and tomatoes, with mayo and sauce that ran down our fingers and hands to our elbows and needed a tea towel to mop up. After that we drank a fake beer in the sunshine listening to reggae on vinyl (he bought a new second hand record player off Marketplace last week) and half fell asleep until his mate came over with a Landrover to fix. He loves mechanics and fixing things, my husband. If only they'd pay him for it.

And now, as this ANZAC day sun sets low in the sky and I drink wine, and my muscles ache and I need a shower, and the birds sing and come and feed from the bird bath, I think how lovely and special days like today are - relatively without incident, productive, relaxing and fun all at the same time.